Huang Residence

Huang Residence was easy enough to find. The land it occupied was enormous—more than half of Crane Lake belonged to the family. Flocks of spiritual birds and divine cranes wheeled and swooped right before their eyes, as if all the cranes and spiritual birds on Crane Head Peak were being raised in the family's backyard.

After all, they were salt merchants. A family that could casually give their son tens or even hundreds of thousands of banknotes for pocket money wasn't exactly ordinary. Buying a mountain and building a villa on it was small potatoes.

The immortals of the mystic sects always looked down on merchants as vulgar, and their money as filthy. Whenever they came across a merchant caravan, they treated it like a windfall in the wild: every merchant was a walking purse, and they'd rob them without hesitation after covering their faces. But when Zheng Zetian had traveled the jianghu, he had actually preferred dealing with business owners who knew how to make money.

First, when he worked for these wealthy families, they could actually afford to pay him. He wouldn't spend half the day fighting and killing, only for them to say at the end, "I'm grateful from the bottom of my heart. I'd work like an ox or a horse to repay you," and then do nothing at all.

Second, people shrewd enough to amass great fortunes understood the importance of making powerful connections and recruiting allies. They were less likely to offend the experts among the Three Religions and Nine Schools. If you could befriend one of them, it was like befriending thousands upon thousands of others, and you'd have connections for all sorts of things.

Third, what was money for if not spending? Only the truly wealthy understood how to spend it wisely